Andrew DeVries has a raucous, infectious laugh, the kind of laugh that automatically makes you feel as though you’ve known him for years. This year marks a 45-year milestone for DeVries and his sculpture studio and gallery, located alongside the Westfield River in the foothills of the Berkshires. Andrew is one of the few sculptors that this writer knows who makes his entire living from his art, and who built a decades-long, successful business from his singular vision of classical sculpture.
DeVries seems a contradiction in terms — on the one hand, a solitary artist deep in the countryside who never watches television and has almost no internet connectivity; and on the other, a gregarious host who holds festive openings, brunches and sculpture demonstrations. He is an accomplished artist who has received multiple commissions and has numerous collectors, who has had major museum exhibits and runs his own sculpture gallery which he recently expanded into a riverside sculpture trail. But he is also an artist who never trod the usual academic pathways, instead traveling America and Europe, sketching classical sculpture in Italy, drawing ballet dancers in Colorado, creating countless studies of the human form.
DeVries’ studio journey began in a small bungalow, now a guest house, next to a stream on River Road in Middlefield. He built his business — initially a bronze foundry — literally from the ground up. DeVries and his father, a dairy farmer from Upstate New York, laid the foundation and built the one-story structure in a summer. For a few years, while DeVries sculpted feverishly and hosted sculpture exhibits in the fields around the foundry, he cast editions of bronze sculpture for area artists. Now he casts only his own bronzes, and his old bungalow is a guest house near the huge, combination studio/gallery and modern farmhouse where he and his wife, Patricia Purdy, live and work.